A discussion that may be largely academic for many participants can be of great personal import and impact for others. It is considerably more difficult for such individuals to establish the distance between person and issue that is demanded for conventional disputation. Establishing this distance becomes all the harder when they feel that their personal stake in the issue is threatened by the other voices in the conversation.

The fact that some people are incapable of establishing such distance is worth reflecting upon. While this alone proves nothing about the legitimacy of either side’s case, problems in this area are generally a symptom of the absence or decay of trust between the parties in the debate. When trust is lacking, even the smallest sense of vulnerability can develop into full blown paranoia, encouraging highly reactive forms of discourse.

In many of our cultural and political debates today, the absence of mutual trust produces paranoia on both sides. When all parties feel vulnerable to other parties that they don’t trust, a paranoid victim mind-set takes hold on all sides, as do reactive modes of interaction. This is quite evident in the ‘culture wars’, for instance, where most parties seem to act as if their existence and identity were on the line, and the discourse plays out like the interactions between two animals that have simultaneously cornered each other. While I will argue that the distrust that prevails in many of our cultural debates is actually a carefully manufactured distrust, this manufactured distrust is seldom a sufficient explanation for the actual distrust that exists between most parties.

More:

As Western society has become progressively more sensitized to victims, the unempowered, and the disenfranchised, and has desired to give a voice to them, we have tended to truncate or limit public discourse in various ways to ensure that such groups don’t feel threatened. While well-meaning, this reformation of public discourse has come at considerable cost. It has rendered the taking of offence or the playing of the victim or underdog card incredibly powerful ploys within debate. In many cases these ploys overwhelm the debate, making challenging debate next to impossible. These ploys, as they are often open to only one party in the debate, establish their own secondary power differential, a differential that can frequently provide more influence on the course of a conversation for those willing and able to leverage it than the primary differential would provide to those advantaged by it. I will discuss this in more depth later in this post.

The retailoring of public discourse around these power differentials and the negotiation of the limited amount of trust between parties has resulted in a significant transformation of that discourse in a manner that jeopardizes certain values that are integral to a free society. Within this transformed public discourse, values such as ‘tolerance’, ‘nonjudgmentalism’, and ‘reasonableness’ are paramount – all values that result in the restriction of reason and the claims of challenging discourse from realms in which they formerly operated. ‘Tolerance’ is perceived to deny any right to subject individuals and their core beliefs and identities to the claims of any greater truth or the challenge of a broader conversation. ‘Nonjudgmentalism’ denies the right to be rigorous in forming and applying considered judgments, particularly moral ones. ‘Reasonableness’ denies us the right to introduce our deepest convictions into public discourse. To be ‘reasonable’ is to expect much less from rational discourse and the power of persuasion, reining in the socially unsettling force of challenging debate, seeking rather to settle matters using the decidedly limited resources of consensus principles.

However, each of these commitments entails the closing down of the sort of challenging and searching public discourse that can secure a free and open society. Discourse is increasingly truncated, to the point that it is no longer able to say much that is meaningful, and is unlikely to be able to settle many of our differences without our deeper convictions being smuggled into the debate under vague terms such as ‘equality’, ‘freedom’, and ‘reciprocity’. With the loss of trust in the power of rational discourse, the unifying power of a shared pursuit of truth, and the effectiveness of persuasion, public discourse provides a slender basis for intellectual community, and core convictions tend to become ghettoized. As this truncated discourse is unable either to resolve or clearly to expose the source of our differences, parties end up talking past each other and the temperature of debates swiftly rise.

And this:

In observing the interaction between Pastor Wilson and his critics in the recent debate, I believe that we were witnessing a collision of two radically contrasting modes of discourse. The first mode of discourse, represented by Pastor Wilson’s critics, was one in which sensitivity, inclusivity, and inoffensiveness are key values, and in which persons and positions are ordinarily closely related. The second mode of discourse, displayed by Pastor Wilson and his daughters, is one characterized and enabled by personal detachment from the issues under discussion, involving highly disputational and oppositional forms of rhetoric, scathing satire, and ideological combativeness.

When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge. However, these protests are probably less a ploy than the normal functioning of the particular mode of discourse characteristic of that community, often the only mode of discourse that those involved are proficient in.

To those accustomed to the first mode of discourse, the scathing satire and sharp criticism of the second appears to be a vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus, when those who adopt such modes of discourse are typically neither personally hurt nor aiming to cause such hurt. Rather, as this second form of discourse demands personal detachment from issues under discussion, ridicule does not aim to cause hurt, but to up the ante of the debate, exposing the weakness of the response to challenge, pushing opponents to come back with more substantial arguments or betray their lack of convincing support for their position. Within the first form of discourse, if you take offence, you can close down the discourse in your favour; in the second form of discourse, if all you can do is to take offence, you have conceded the argument to your opponent, as offence is not meaningful currency within such discourse.

There’s much, much more to this post, and I hope you’ll read the whole thing. Roberts’s conclusion is that while it is right to expect people to be sensitive to how their discourse is heard by others, we cannot allow our argumentation to be limited by the kind of people Roberts describes as “offence-takers.” Excerpt:

One routine tactic employed by offence-takers is to accuse anyone who opposes their (typically radical) positions of waging a ‘culture war’. Offence-takers win by society’s choice of appeasement as its response to their unreasonable demands and incessant agitation. The agitators will generally present themselves as people of peace. They have no desire to start a culture war. All that society has to do is to accede to their – perfectly reasonable! – demands and peace will prevail. Whenever people choose to resist the demands of the agitators they will be presented as beastly bullies and belligerent culture warriors. While they are pressing to achieve their goals, and even more so when they have achieved and wish to consolidate their gains, offence-takers will present themselves as proactive about peace. Any attempt to regain lost ground will be presented as unprovoked aggression. Offence-takers consistently lament the belligerence and intractability of their opponents.

Exactly right. Exactly. And I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting one more passage:

One of the immediate effects of the culture of offence is to encourage the thinning of skins, and the raising of sensitivities. Persons are trained to be suspicious to the point of paranoia of all differing viewpoints, a suspicion that enables them to put the worst possible construction on the words and actions of their opponents and critics. Far from representing a triumph of critical thinking, these hermeneutics of suspicion tend to reproduce the same threadbare analyses that have been applied on a myriad previous occasions and create a sterile groupthink…

In general, the contemporary mode of emotionalism and herding is the human default. The great ages of intellectual progress via debate were rare social constructs, and it’s not surprising that they easily break down.

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44 Responses to Tyranny Of The Offence-Takers

Interesting. That certainly accounts for the strategy employed by folks criticizing the Obama administration’s HHS regulation on employer insurance for contraception this past year. As the LA Times reported in an article called “Before current birth-control fight, Republicans backed mandates”, even high-profile Republicans like Mike Huckabee had signed similar bills into law. But once they realized the president wanted to do it, they decided that it was tyranny against their religious freedom. (“A direct violation of the 1st Amendment”, Huckabee explained).

Offense taking can be a strategy, or it can be misplaced, or it can be quite sincere and well placed. I suppose that’s the case with almost all styles of argumentation.

The point is well taken, but the response would be that there *are* legitimate complaints out there. Can anyone deny that there are long-term consequences of slavery and racism that specifically affect African Americans, particularly those whose roots in this country extend back prior to the Civil War? Cultures, especially native cultures, are resilient things, after all.

So how are these situations supposed to be remedied? The danger with this kind of argument is that it can very easily be used to dismiss legitimate grievances, on the very grounds that *because* someone has been victimized, they *cannot* make an argument. It’s not blaming the victim, but perhaps something even more perverse: denying the victim’s existence.

It’s very easy to see how this very quickly turns into the worst kind of conservatism: the deliberate conservation of unfair and unjust social and economic structures.

the scathing satire and sharp criticism of the second appears to be a vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus, when those who adopt such modes of discourse are typically neither personally hurt nor aiming to cause such hurt. Rather, as this second form of discourse demands personal detachment from issues under discussion, ridicule does not aim to cause hurt, but to up the ante of the debate, exposing the weakness of the response to challenge, pushing opponents to come back with more substantial arguments or betray their lack of convincing support for their position.

This is the basic excuse making of a juvenile bully. They don’t mean it, really, it’s all in good fun, and it’s for your own good, and why are you getting so upset, anyway?

There’s no “deep” explanation for this. They argue like that because they enjoy it. Rush Limbaugh famously said he got his start in political talk radio because he realize that he “was really good at insulting people.” That, the monetary compensation and the personal enjoyment one gets from it are the explanations. It doesn’t go much deeper than that.

The rather long “entire essay” is actually only part 4 of a 4-part series.

I would say a key part of “arguing well” is striving for concision.

Mr. Roberts’ in-the-arena strategy for arguing seems, in part, to be to bore his opponent to death.

No doubt boring readers to death with tedious re-statements of the Eternal Verities and condescending explanations of how those who don’t agree are suffering from false consciousness is better than being a professional offence-taker.

If Mr. Roberts wants his ideas, or rather the ideas he champions, to be heard and to spread, he should consider shifting his writing strategy. There is privilege inherent in taking as long as he does to communicate anything.

It is indeed regrettable that so many people don’t know how to “argue well” and resort to numerous shortcuts. Mr. Roberts might consider thinking about what the lives of the majority of humanity look like–why they might not have time to pore over his , and how to better reach them with his message and his ideas.

On second thought, on seeing that he writes sentences like this:

“It is a celebration of a creation irreducible to a stagnant homogeneous logic of the Same, but which bursts forth in ever more glorious and surprising – and therefore difficult, challenging, unexpected – differences.”

I guess I would recommend instead that he start by reading Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

Conservatives who only know how to make arguments, and not how to tell stories, indeed!

“Political correctness” equals “being respectful of everyone else, even if I disagree with them or they are different from me”. I fail to see why this is so controversial among conservatives. If everyone spoke like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, would we all understand each other better?

Interesting. As I read this, I was thinking of your multiple posts on Obama’s alleged war on religion. A classic offence-taker position, if there ever was one. I wonder if offence-takers can actually see what they are doing … or, whether, this is one of those irregular verbs: “I discuss, you take offence.”

Naturally, the mere categorization itself is meant to stifle argument and dissent. “Exactly right. Exactly.” That is, “I have been presenting arguments on x, y and z reasonably, and if it were not for those damned offence-takers who never listen to me and who, gasp, have a thin skin, we would just have a reasonable discussion.” …

Of course, as Freud said, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar; and sometimes, offence needs be taken.

Why do people like Gretchen keep labeling Bill O’Reilly a conservative? I’m not sure what he is, but I know he is against the death penalty, he is in favor of gay couples adopting children, he believes in climate change and thinks we are partly responsible for it, he has nothing but contempt for the oil companies, etc. Do you ever watch The Factor?

@Carol: Bill O’Reilly speaks against political correctness, which in his case is anyone who disagrees with him. People who yell “political correctness!” are people who don’t want to be disagreed with, whatever the content of their speech. They use the term to shut down discussion.

I don’t think O’Reilly shuts down discussion. He always has guests on who disagree with him. Using your logic, Gretchen, I guess Chris Matthews is a conservative because he won’t tolerate anyone who disagrees with him. In fact, most hosts on MSNBC must be conservative.

You should know, out of my hope of being at least courteous in any discussion about political correctness, that I see PC as a stain on our social fabric. Do, please, allow me to explain.

In my cynicism — and I do try to be unemotional about it, but I sometimes fall short — politically correct speech is an arbitrary and tyrannical act to force people to show respect when they feel the opposite. In short, it forces people to lie.

There is a very large difference between the courtesy (something more than just respect) I offer another person as a default, and my disagreement with something that person believes, supports or desires. PC permits such people to automatically negate that courtesy even when it is still true and valid.

Roberts is dead-on correct in his premise and conclusions. Rational discourse is impossible when one side (and too often both sides) believe that emotional rhetoric is of any value to the facts and the effort to find compromise or consensus. Our Congress — both houses — is essentially feckless for exactly that reason.

I think that’s a lot of words for not a lot of usefulness; as Tyro pointed out, it’s the same justification is used by people who insult or abuse other people for their own amusement. The quote that appears to have started the whole thing was from a book holding the farcical assumption that anything insulting in their work is just “straight talk”, which does not suggest to me it is operating at a higher level of discourse.

Few people would object to the notion that “taking offense” happens when nothing offensive was said or meant, or that some people are too thin-skinned. Or even that it can shutdown discourse, or is used by trolls. (I’ve seen more than one time that the insult, the talking about the insult, and the thin-skinned offended response were all trolls, or possibly the same troll).

But the way he’s casting objecting to insults and taking offense as a whole other level of discourse isn’t useful. They’re just good or bad responses; the world of argument doesn’t consist of 4chan and stifled gender studies classes, and categorizing them like that isn’t going to be that helpful.

There’s also to the “my side’s potentially offensive statements are sharp satire and scathing criticism, while yours are unreasonable insults indicative of taking emotional offense” issue.

Alastair Roberts was writing about some comments a Pastor Wilson had made. It took some clicking through, but here’s the pertinent quote from Pastor Wilson:

“When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.” – http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/triggering-and-triggered-1/

It appears that some Christian women took offense at this characterization of Christian male-female relationships.

It’s worthy of note that all Alastair Roberts’s commentary on this subject are headlined with the notice:
“WARNING: This post contains language and discussion that rape or sexual abuse survivors may find upsetting.”

reflection ephemeral: Offense taking can be a strategy, or it can be misplaced, or it can be quite sincere and well placed. I suppose that’s the case with almost all styles of argumentation.

Tyro: This is the basic excuse making of a juvenile bully. They don’t mean it, really, it’s all in good fun, and it’s for your own good, and why are you getting so upset, anyway?

Both well-said. I’d add two things. One, I went back and read the original post by Douglas Wilson, to which Rachel Held Evans objected. I for one thought Wilson’s original essay was appalling and, yes, offensive. I do not share Wilson’s (and apparently also Robert’s) “complimentarian” view of gender; but even if I did, Wilson’s essay would still appall me.

Two, Roberts does make some valid points, but after awhile the essay sounds like a very long, very erudite, very indirect way of saying, “Those dang liberals are always using emotivism and offense-taking at every little thing, rather than engaging in logical argumentation, and thereby working their nefarious will on society.” Which could have been said more concisely, whether one agrees with or not (I don’t).

“Political correctness” equals “being respectful of everyone else, even if I disagree with them or they are different from me”. I fail to see why this is so controversial among conservatives. If everyone spoke like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, would we all understand each other better?

No, “political correctness” means using the terms “respect” and “politeness” to limit the parameters of discussion, or to force the debate to acknowledge a lie as the truth.

I think Bill Maher of all people hit the nail on the head when he said “Politically incorrect does not mean conservative, it means honest.”

I don’t think that most people really think that it is a horrible impingement on freedom that white people are not supposed to say “the n-word.” The problem is that when talking about the problems of the black community, the gay community, women’s issues, etc., if it is considered rude to suggest that any of their problems are self-inflicted or due to nature, then you wind up with the only acceptable stance being that straight white males are responsible for all of their problems. And yet this is what people such as Eric Holder want when they talk about “an honest discussion.”

What bothers people like Ann Coulter is that conservatives are expected to argue for conservatism while accepting essentially all of the liberal principles.

Of course, sometimes people go overboard and deliberately be offensive in retaliation, and that is generally a bad idea (e.g. there is a picture that circulated the internet a while back of Obama shining Palin’s shoes – it was offensive and it did not make any real effective point to justify the offensiveness). I don’t think that people should try to offend for the sake of offending. But I don’t think that legitimate concerns should be quashed for the sake of not offending people, either.

There are some additional contextual and practical weaknesses of the “second form of discourse” (which I will call the Insensitive Form for brevity’s sake). The persuasive power of the Insensitive Form is eviscerated in a context where there is an insufficient commonality of epistemological and metaphysical assumptions. People who deploy the Insensitive Form imagining they are Cicero in the Senate delude themselves if they do so in such a context, where deploying that form renders them less rather than more persuasive. And, unless one is posing to not to persuade as to rally one’s own side, the principle practical purpose of rhetoric is to persuade; if your rhetorical style does not assist in that purpose, it’s a rhetorical failure. It’s your audience that decides this, not you.

Now, the Internet is a context where the Insensitive Style is most ineffective; the Insensitive Style works best in face-to-face encounters with an audience conducive to it.

On the Internet, rhetorical humility* – a whisper – is *far* more effective than rhetorical grandiosity.

* Humility is not the same thing as modesty. Humility is realism (modesty is artifice): knowing by heart the weakest links in your assumptions, facts and arguments and the strongest of those who disagree with you, and owning up to both forthrightily.

The Alastair Roberts post goes on far too long, but I found a great deal that was congruent with my experiences teaching in urban public high schools. I, too, have sensed what I can only call (hoping not go give offense) as a feminization of discourse. This discourse is centered around ideas of respect and tolerance for the speaker and for a presumed consensus of right-thinking people. There is little separation between the personhood of the interlocutor and the quality of one’s ideas.

Ideas have morphed into commitments, which turn into identities both personal and communal. To challenge another person’s central ideas, especially to do so in an uncompromising and harsh way, is seen as tantamount to personal assault.

To tell someone, “You are mistaken about one or more of your core beliefs, and, further, you are doing harm in your advocacy” is regarded as offensive.

I happen to disagree with Roberts on many counts, but I do agree with him that we have seen in the hierarchy of rhetoric the rise of sensitivity and the decline of truth.

I can imagine that Roberts’ tone would infuriate those who like to throw around incendiary words. He is calm and analytical to a fault. And that he goes on and on and on is indeed a fault.

Reading this long post reminded me of how Lawrence Summers outraged many feminists at Harvard by speculating that there may be genetic underpinnings for the relative lack of women in such fields as physics and mathematics. I remember reading news accounts at the time. Call it bias, perhaps, but I clearly remember reading about how women faculty were quoted as saying things such as, “I feel like throwing up. I am so upset.”

No doubt, there are times when we should get outraged and offended. But those occasions, it seems to me, should be opportunities to struggle against injustice or evil. We don’t all agree on what those things are, but we should be careful not to get self-indulgent in our outrage.

The problem is not in recognizing victims, per se. It’s who gets granted victim status, which is highly coveted now, and who does not get this privilege.

The unself-conscious naive comment about “political correctness” being just good manners, instead of the phony, self-regarding, sentimentalist ideology masquerading as enlightenment that it truly is, is a perfect example of the politically correct mentality.

Remarkable — an example of the very thing condemned by Roberts’s blog. Roberts never endorses Pastor Wilson’s point of view (a point of view that, in my view, is highly objectionable), and indeed says that Jared Wilson “was right to apologize” for it. What Roberts objects to — rightly — is the idea that Wilson’s discourse shut down not because his opponents showed his premises or his logic to be faulty, but because they said he hurt their feelings.

This is a very, very common strategy when same-sex marriage comes up for discussion. You readers don’t see the comments I don’t approve, in which the would-be commenter uses some variation on, “Shut up, you bigot/homophobe/hater.” Just today, for example, I declined to post a lengthy comment in which the reader pretty much said that anybody who opposes SSM has blood on their hands. That’s not an argument; that’s a conniption.

It may well the the case that the person who holds an opinion opposite from yours may do so for immoral or otherwise discreditable reasons, but in most cases, meeting their argument with nothing more than shrieks of “how dare you!” is an implicit admission that you’ve got nothing to say.

I’m going to sound like a moron, but would someone please explain what “cake and eat it” means. I just read Rod’s interpretation of it, and I still don’t get it.

I did get a tremendous charge out reading Roberts’ essay. However I thought that the warning label he put at the top was either pathetic, or just bizarre. I heard the BBC this week defining the word “jejeune”. Whatever jejeune is, that warning label is also.

No, “political correctness” means using the terms “respect” and “politeness” to limit the parameters of discussion, or to force the debate to acknowledge a lie as the truth.

I think Bill Maher of all people hit the nail on the head when he said “Politically incorrect does not mean conservative, it means honest.”

I dislike the term “politically correct”. I prefer the older term, “polite”.

Basic manners often obliges a little dishonesty. When you tell an annoying relative how happy you are to see him, that’s being polite.

Political incorrectness is basically being rude. It’s telling jokes about someone that are meant to demean more than entertain. It’s getting angry when someone wishes you “Happy holidays” instead of accepting the good wishes.

Certainly, there are different levels of respect, many of which must be earned. But everyone deserves a basic level of decency, even people we don’t like or disapprove of. Political incorrectness ignores that social obligation.

Put things another way: like it or not, we live in a diverse society, with people with a wide variety of backgrounds and beliefs. Politeness and manners, what is dismissed as political correctness, are the social lubrication that allows a diverse society to work.

With respect to discussing social and cultural problems in other communities, that’s always going to be problematic. People don’t like outsiders showing up and criticizing them, even if the criticism is valid. That’s just human nature.

They will take what you have to say in criticism a lot more seriously if you first demonstrate that you’re coming from a place of genuine concern rather than just criticizing for the sake of criticizing. To use a hyperbolic example, African Americans are probably not going to take the criticism of the KKK terribly well, even if it’s constructive. Fraternal correction only works if the person you’re correcting is truly your frater.

There’s a bit of wisdom in the Gospels relating to motes and beams which probably ought to be kept in mind here.

I dislike the term “politically correct”. I prefer the older term, “polite”.

They are not the same thing.

Basic manners often obliges a little dishonesty. When you tell an annoying relative how happy you are to see him, that’s being polite.

The difference is that politeness is merely formal. Political correctness requires that you internalize the lie. Politeness is telling an ugly woman that she is attractive. Political correctness is encouraging her to try for a modeling job and then picketing the modeling agency if they don’t hire her.

It’s all well and good to be polite in social situations. But when discussing actual policies, politeness must not get in the way of clear thinking.

With respect to discussing social and cultural problems in other communities, that’s always going to be problematic. People don’t like outsiders showing up and criticizing them, even if the criticism is valid. That’s just human nature.

It’s not like Eric Holder has any compunctions about calling white people “cowards.” If the lower rate of black success is constantly going to be blamed on “privilege” and “institutional racism,” I am definitely not going to decline to launch alternate theories in order to avoid “rudeness.”

Which is not to say that people should be gratuitously rude or offensive. But if all ways of looking at a problem other than the leftist’s preferred way of looking at it is going to be dismissed as “rude,” then I prefer being thought rude to being a coward.

Political correctness is the process of a political community (today, mostly the left, but technically it could be any community) achieving epistemic closure and then imposing its closure on the rest of society.

Now to explain why I dislike “political correctness:”

Geoff Guth, how would you feel if talking about global warming was limited in society? What if suggesting that burning fossil fuels caused global warming got you branded a bigot? If it were considered impolite to talk about it, and that ignoring anything suggesting that anthropogenic global warming was happening was considered proper courtesy, not just in private conversations, but in policy discussions? What if all problems relating to global warming were blamed on environmentalists, and environmentalists were charged with being bigoted cowards unless they had “an honest discussion” on global warming that consisted of oil, coal, and gas executives telling them how bad environmentalists were?

That type of thing is what we are discussing here, not whether or not someone should feel that it is okay to use racial slurs in public.

“But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Matthew 5:22, KJV

The excerpts go a long way in explaining how I feel like an outlier at times. Maybe it’s because I have Aspergers, but even when it comes to issues like same-sex marriage I am able to disconnect emotionally from the issue in order to hear the other side. I’ve never really understood some of my compatriots that will talk about having a conversation, but then use some of the tactics involved to shut down debate. I tend to think that when someone is objecting to same sex marriage, that they don’t necessarily hate me as a person. We are talking about an issue that has a lot of questions and is of great importance- it makes no sense for me to get emotional and unreasonable.

I also think that trying to be more detached and more willing to listen is part of the art of persuasion. Maybe the person on the other side of an issue won’t ever take my side; but then again, maybe they will because someone took the time to listen to them instead of shooting them down in the name of tolerance.

As a gay man who would love to marry his partner, I of course have a stake in an issue like same sex marriage. But I don’t want to get same sex marriage by trying to make the other side shut up. I fear that the tactics on my side that some use might end biting us in the future.

It might seem odd, but I want to converse with social conservatives. I don’t expect they will change their minds, but I do want to hear what they have to say and be willing to learn from them. And I hope being able to open myself to them will allow them to see gay people as not so scary and learn something as well.

I really don’t get why people are so scared of each other.

[Note from Rod: This is interesting to me, in part because it seems to me that your Asperger’s is a *strength* as a pastor. I would have thought that the relative lack of empathy Aspies have would have made it more difficult to be a pastor. I guess it’s just a lot more complicated. In my marriage, for example, there are times when my wife’s extraordinary female empathy helps her to perceive the reality in difficult social situations that I can’t see, and to find a good way through it; there are other times in which her empathy stymies her, and my comparative abstraction from the situation helps me to see things more clearly, and to find the better path. — RD]

Eric Holder is wrong for the same reasons. You don’t go off half-cocked at people outside of your group. That being said, two wrongs don’t make a right either.

And in Holder’s case, he may feel that he has some claim to membership in both the black community and the political elite. People with a foot in two camps like that can often serve a useful purpose as a kind of ambassador. I’m sure in the liberal elite circles he moves in, nothing he said was controversial. But he doesn’t get how far his voice as AG carries.

But I do sympathize a bit with his position. Even when you’ve got a legitimate claim to being part of a group, it can be hard bringing criticisms. Just ask Bill Cosby. Heck, I’ve brought up some of the concerns that have been mentioned here on gay liberal discussion boards and gotten reamed for it myself, but then I’m naturally argumentative and a contrarian. Which is ac nice way of saying a slightly more evolved internet troll.

When your Chief Diversity Officer declares idioms such as “holding down the fort” racist and “rule of thumb” sexist, you have crossed the line from advocating good manners and inclusiveness to political correctness. When you are found guilty of racial harassment for reading the book “Notre Dame vs. the Klan” in public, you have crossed the line from promoting politeness to political correctness. When 10% of the faculty at your university encourage the feeding frenzy against you when you’ve been accused (falsely) of rape, you see political correctness run amok. When people are excoriated for using words like niggardly, politically correctness has run amok. When writing “chink in your armor” gets you fired from your job, politically correctness has run amok.

It is true that people often hide behind accusations of PC when they are called on their boorish behavior, but let’s not pretend that at least in HR departments and universities political correctness isn’t problematic nor that it has real world consequences for its victims.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers’ talk, saying later that if she hadn’t left, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

[Note from Rod: My gosh. Does Nancy Hopkins even belong at a university if that’s how she reacts to ideas she doesn’t like? Is she 13 years old? That is pathetic, absurd, childish, and ten kinds of objectionable. — RD]

Re: I do not share Wilson’s (and apparently also Robert’s) “complimentarian” view of gender; but even if I did, Wilson’s essay would still appall me.

I sort of do hold to a vaguely complementarian view of gender (though a different and more attenuated form than Pastor Wilson’s, and not even a specifically ‘biblical’ one). Having said that, I still share your (and Rod’s too) disapproval of Pastor Wilson’s piece.

Re: [Note from Rod: My gosh. Does Nancy Hopkins even belong at a university if that’s how she reacts to ideas she doesn’t like? Is she 13 years old? That is pathetic, absurd, childish, and ten kinds of objectionable. — RD]

For “offense-takers of the season,” I nominate every conservative Christian who is personally offended when anyone fails to say “Merry Christmas,” or worse, says “Happy Holidays.” You know who you are.

Hector: I sort of do hold to a vaguely complementarian view of gender (though a different and more attenuated form than Pastor Wilson’s, and not even a specifically ‘biblical’ one).

Well, there’s some complimentarity–men don’t give birth! Also, I’d say there’s not really much reasonable doubt that there are subtle gender differences (aside from the obvious physical ones)–men and women have the same average intelligence, but men’s IQ curves are “flatter” (more at both ends of the curve–more learning disabilities and more super-geniuses); women process language better (far fewer reading and language disabilities); women probably tend to be more empathetic; men tend to think more abstractly; and so on.

I am egalitarian in that I don’t think such general tendencies should serve as a template for cookie-cutter gender roles. Fewer women might want to go into nuclear physics than men, and fewer men than women might want to be kindergarten teachers; but for those who do so want and who have the right temperament and abilities, they should absolutely do so, and with no stigma. Women should be given equal opportunity and equal respect.

Most importantly, I see no warrant in Scripture for gender discrimination and think Paul’s stuff about male headship (if Paul even wrote it–there are scholarly doubts) are culture-bound artifacts not relevant to modern Christians. I certainly don’t think that the Bible, the Tradition, or the bishops, cardinals, or the Pope himself have any place telling any couple how to order their marriage. If the woman works, that’s fine; if she stays home with the kids, fine; if the man stays home with the kids (which I have done for much of my marriage either through a night job, temporary unemployment, or having more flexible hours), also fine.

I greatly dislike the Evangelical complimentarians (among whom the whole Wilson-Evans brouhaha originated) who want to impose a single structure on marriages as the only “Biblically correct” one. I think they’re distorting Scripture and Tradition. Moreover, it was exactly from a complemenatrian perspective (though he didn’t use that term) that G. K. Chesterton argued (quite charmingly and genially, though wrongly) against women’s suffrage! I don’t think it’s an accident that such men use violent language such as Wilson did, or that they even (as one of the SSPX bishops did awhile back) argue that women should never wear pants and that it is even of questionable use for them to go to college!

Having said that, if a man and a woman want to live an Evangelical-style complimentarian marriage, and if it makes them and their kids happy, that’s fine by me–their marriage is none of my business. The things that worry me about these people, though, is that many of them have broader social agendas and would like to impose their model on everyone else if they could. Not likely, but not comforting, either. I suspect that behind a lot of such ideology (and I’m not imputing this to everyone in that camp or making a blanket statement) is fear of female empowerment over the last fifty years, often mixed with a big dose of good old fashioned misogyny. To that extent, I agree with Rachel Held Evans.

I’d more or less agree with everything you say up there, and that’s why I say I’m complementarian only in an attenuated sense. (I mean that basically as a way of saying that I’m *not* a hardcore feminist or cultural liberal in the way I think about gender).

The basic things I believe about gender are something like the following.

1) Men and women have, on average, pronounced behavioural, physiological, and psychological differences, rooted in evolution.

2) Men and women, *on average* (with many exceptions) are likely to be looking to get somewhat different things from careers, relationships, etc.

3) I believe there’s a lot to be said for relationships and marriages in which the two partners occupy somewhat distinct roles: one taking on the role of protecting, providing and nurturing their partner, the other the role of caregiving and childrearing. I don’t think it’s necessary that one gender be the more economically active one and the other focus on childrearing: although more women than men will *probably* want to prioritize children over career, that division shouldn’t be forced on anyone. I think St. Paul had, at least, an interesting point when he suggested marriages should feature distinct roles, but I don’t believe that in every case men or women should be forced into one of those specific roles.

4) Having said that, I *don’t* agree with the Evangelical model of gender, nor do I believe, as a general rule, in ‘male headship’. If a particular couple wants to adopt the evangelical model that’s fine, though.